Audio 2:40
Greek government loses coalition member

Greece is facing yet another political crisis after the smallest of the three coalition parties in government, pulled out. It follows a split over the shutdown of the public broadcaster.

Transcript

ELIZABETH JACKSON: Greece is facing yet another political crisis after the smallest of the three coalition parties in government pulled out.

It follows a split over the shutdown of the public broadcaster, as our Europe correspondent Philip Williams reports.

(TV host on ERT speaking Greek)

PHILIP WILLIAMS: Ten days ago these were the last words heard on the State Television Station, essentially the ABC of Greece.

The government said it had to cut costs and about half the 2,600 employees would be re-employed in a slimmed down version at a later stage.

It also coincided with the need to cut 2,000 public sector jobs before the end of the month as part of the so called Troika bailout agreement.

(Greek demonstration chants)

PHILIP WILLIAMS: But shutting down the state broadcaster sparked demonstrations across the country and a court ruling that it should be reinstated, which it hasn't been.

But the political fractures go way beyond the ERT crisis, because the smallest of the three parties that make up the government, the Democratic Left, have walked out of the coalition and that leaves the government with just a three seat majority.

Dr Sotirious Paroutis is an associate professor at the UK's Warwick Business School.

SOTIRIOUS PAROUTIS: So it's not a complete abandonment of any reform legislation, or reform opportunities in the future, but it's definitely a weakening of the political majority the Greek government was relying upon.

PHILIP WILLIAMS: Professor Yannis Varoufakis, from Athens University, says the crisis has been engineered by the prime minister, Antonis Samaras, to bring on an early election.

YANNIS VAROUFAKIS: My view is that the prime minister is no fool. He knows that if he waits until the end of the year or the beginning of 2014, this propaganda story that Greece is recovering and stabilising is going to be proven for what it is, this pure hot air. Greece is continuing to implode. So he prefers to polarise politics now, possibly to have a general election soon.

He doesn't want to be seen as the politician who is bringing on the election, he wants to force the smaller parties in his coalition to do it.

So effectively what he did was he made the move that no centre-left politician can accept.

PHILIP WILLIAMS: After a period of relative calm, the spectre of instability in Greece is again very real. The markets and the lenders won't like it, and the Greek voters may just have to lump it.